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Ted Bryar
Doctor Theodore "Ted" Bryar is a schizophrenic cop killer who appears in the Season One episode "Derailed". Background Ted presumably suffered from paranoid schizophrenia from a young age. As a result of the voices inside his head, he spent his childhood and adolescent years isolated from his peers, studying. He later became one of the world's top physicists, studying, in particular, the M-theory and writing hundreds of essays about it. He also worked for the U.S. government for several years in unspecified position(s) during the 1980s. He was placed in the Stokes Mental Health Center in El Paso in 1996, presumably due to his schizophrenia growing more pronounced. His mental illness was treated by Linda Deaton, a psychiatrist. Derailed Deaton planned to bring Ted to Dallas, Texas, for a conference, as an example of the progress being made to relieve severe psychosis. During the train ride on the way there, someone jumps in front of the train to commit suicide, forcing the train to stop. This, coupled with him noticing Elle, who was reading FBI files, in a nearby seat, causes Ted to have a mental breakdown. Spurred by his imaginary friend Leo, he takes a gun from a train security guard, fatally shoots him, handcuffs Elle to her seat, takes her gun as well, and holds the passengers, including Elle and Deaton, hostage. After two hours of trying to reason with him, the local authorities manage to convince Ted to let them place a telephone inside the train car. However, Ted refuses to speak to anyone but an operative of "The Higher Authority", a part of his schizophrenic delusions. Gideon calls him and pretends to be such. Ted then gives him an hour to send in a technician to remove "it", which the BAU later deduce to be an imaginary microchip that Ted believed caused the voices in his head. Reid suggests that he could use sleight of hand to pretend to remove the chip by hiding a regular chip in his hand, making a small cut in Ted's arm then showing Ted the "removed" chip. Boarding the train car, he is ordered by Ted to remove his bulletproof vest first before removing the chip. Reid follows his orders and tricks him into believing he actually removed the chip, however, Ted orders him to "turn it on". Improvising, Reid, and Elle claim that the chip was powered by tiny electric impulses fired between neurons and had to be implanted to work. Since Ted's voices, logically, didn't go away, he continues to hold Reid on the train. Reid soon recognizes Ted's behavior, having a schizophrenic mother, and manages to distract him long enough for Elle to drop-kick him, after which another passenger who had a concealed 1911 Competition handgun shoots him in the stomach. He is then taken away by paramedics, repeating, "I'm sorry." He presumably survived his gunshot wound and was put into a mental institution. Profile The BAU instantly realized Ted was a psychotic, due to the fact that he appeared to suffer from tardive dyskinesia, a condition that causes uncontrollable facial tics, and which stems from years of antipsychotic usage. Extremely paranoid, Ted believed that the government or some other clandestine group was monitoring him, and as delusions are often shaped by personal experience, his years of work for the government were presumably what caused his fantasies. Ted's delusions manifested in the form of hallucinations, voices, burning and buzzing sensations, which he believed were caused by chips implanted in his body, as his rants and the scars present on his arms indicated. Though he was suffering from a psychotic break, Ted's speech was still lucid and showed no signs of neologisms, word salads, or loosening of associations, meaning his thinking was still relatively organized. Ted's delusion were an important factor in diffusing the situation and had to be played too, which the BAU did through several means, such as denying him information about who they were, making themselves appear more mysterious, and thus higher in authority to him. Modus Operandi Ted threatened, beat, and shot his hostages with a pair of 9mm handguns: one a Beretta 92FS stolen from the train security guard he killed and the other a Glock 19 taken from Elle. Real-Life Comparison Ted was presumably loosely based on Ralph Tortorici (whom he was compared to in the episode) - Both were paranoid schizophrenics who took hostages under delusions involving government monitoring them via microchips planted in their bodies, used firearms to do so, attacked law enforcement, and were ultimately stopped and subdued by their hostages. Known Victims *November 23, 2005: The train standoff: **Unnamed security guard **Held five people hostage on the passenger train and intended to kill them. They are: ***Elle Greenaway ***Josh Patel ***Elaine Curtis ***Harry Anderson ***Doctor Linda Deaton **Spencer Reid Notes *Ted Bryar is the first unsub in the Criminal Minds franchise whose identity is already revealed to the audience during the episode's cold open. Appearances *Season One **"Derailed" **"What Fresh Hell?" *Season Four **"Memoriam" *Season Eleven **"Entropy" References Category:Criminal Minds Characters Category:Criminals Category:Unclassified Killers Category:Season One Criminals Category:Institutionalized Criminals Category:Schizophrenics Category:Attempted Mass Murderers Category:Psychotics Category:Cop Killers Category:Mentally Ill Criminals Category:Hostage Takers